I was maudlin in the days following my return from Laerothia. I found myself missing Tara more than I thought possible, wondering if she missed me as well. If she thought of me when she bathed in her pool, or when the sheets kissed her sleeping form. If she saw my face, felt my touch, deep into the night when she was alone with her thoughts.
"Turn my page please?" Zhahllaia asked. The djinn stood close by me, a book open in front of her on the table. She shifted her weight from one bare leg to the other, the minute chains jingling softly. I reached over and turned the page. She regarded me, amused annoyance in her gold-flecked eyes. "You're pining for your elf."
I sat in the chair by the table, my book on my lap, going unread. I had been staring out the narrow window at the Gray Ocean, sparkling under a blue sky. Gulls soared on the clean winds, their mad cries a regular punctuation of the crashing waves. "And if I am?"
"It is unbecoming. She is a noble, and a significant one if the size of her holdings is any indication. The alliance you created with her will serve us well in the future. But staring out that window isn't any closer to making me tangible."
"You're right," I sighed. No amount of staring at the water would make Tara appear in this place.
"Clear your mind," Zhahllaia said. "Go down to the water and think upon your elf. Put her in your mind until your thoughts are exhausted. Do this every day until you are once again ready to work."
I closed the tome and set it aside, standing. "And you?"
"Return me to my lamp." She stood on her tiptoes and brushed her lips over my cheek. The trill of sensation made its way down my spine. "I will be awaiting when your heart and mind returns from Laerothia."
I returned her and made my way outside, following the path down the cliff to the rocky shore below. The sky was free of clouds that day, the weather warming with the commencement of summer. The waves battered the rocks at low tide, and Oddrin spread his wings to ride the gusts pushing in from off the coast. I stripped to my breeches at the cliffs, securing my things on a high rock. The sun was warm and the wind was cool and Zhahllaia was right. I instantly felt more present than I had since the sojourn to the elves had ended. Standing at the edge of that gargantuan body of water, I could accept that Tara was far away, and that we had countless years to reunite. Even then, our time together would always be fleeting.
I made my way over the rocks, past pools of darting fish. A short way down the coast, a pyramidal rock rose from the shallows. At high tides, it was an island. Now, as the tide was at its ebb, an avenue of irregularly-sized stones stretched to its base. The urge to climb to the top was overwhelming, and I decided to listen, reasoning that this was part of my true returning.
As I arrived at the base of the pyramid, my resolve fled and I felt like a fool. Climb to the top, and then what? I wouldn't be facing Tara for one thing. For another, if I wanted a view of the ocean, a higher one was in my room. Risking injury or even death hardly seemed the rational thing to do.
I nearly returned to my room, but then thought of what Zhahllaia would say to me. She would remind me that she had served as counselor for the rulers of a mighty empire. She was known as "the Enlightened" for a reason. This impulse united a desire with a form, and therefore I would do it. With renewed intent, I walked around the side, looking for a way up. What I saw at brought me to a stunned stop.
A woman struggled on the rocks just out of the water. A fishing net had trapped her as surely as a gargantuan spider's web.
She was nude, her skin striped aqua and yellow, and obviously not human. Her color paled and her stripes vanished over her chest and belly. Her hands and feet were webbed, and she sported fins on her forearms and calves. What I initially took for hair was a pinkish mass of tentacles. She attacked the net with the curved black claws that tipped her fingers, but her efforts were vain. The more she struggled, the more entangled she became.
My shock pinioned me in place. I took in more details of her as I wondered what to do. She was beautiful, despite, or perhaps because of her inhumanity. Her body was shapely, sleek muscles moving beneath her striped skin. Her face was a pleasing oval, the stripes reaching up her cheeks, around her lips, and haloing her huge eyes. These settled on me, and were it not for their size, they would almost be human. The color--blue flecked with pink--was like nothing I had ever beheld. She opened her wide mouth, baring teeth that looked human. Then those retracted into her gums and shards of serrated bone popped free as she uttered a terrifying hiss.
She was a nereid, a child of elemental water. I had learned of them in my studies, but they frequented deep water, rarely coming to the surface in the daylight. They were powerful in their element, but vulnerable on land.
I held my hands up. "Don't be afraid," I soothed. "I will not harm you."
She hissed again, her struggles growing more desperate. The net wrapped her more tightly. Her gill slits were flared, showing the filaments within looking pink and wan. I couldn't tell if she was drowning in the air, or if something perhaps more metaphysical was taking place. If the net had bound her to the land. Regardless, I could not leave her.
I took a step, and her thrashing constricted the net further. One of her arms was now trapped, and her chest heaved futilely. I knelt by her and she swiped at me with a claw, but she didn't have a proper angle or range of motion to touch me. "I know you can't understand my words and I know you don't trust me," I said, "but I'm going to get you out of this." I kept my tone soft and even, my hands out and empty.
I gripped the net over her belly, drawing it away from her skin. She smelled of the sea on a clear spring day, strong but pleasing. I spoke a word, bringing my will to bear. The net between my hands ignited and snapped, the flame quickly guttering without my will sustaining it. She hissed more loudly and swiped at me, closer but still unable to touch me.
Oddrin flapped down to alight on a nearby rock, and he returned her hisses. The night eft momentarily captured her attention, giving me a bit of space to break more of the net. I worked on the rope weave, burning it apart bit by bit, steadily freeing the nereid from its deadly embrace. As the process continued, her struggles only grew more violent and her attacks on me closer. With the final piece broken, she landed a swipe, opening four parallel slices over my chest. I fell back with a yelp, and she dove into the waves and was gone.
Cursing, I made my way back to my clothes and returned to Thunderhead, cleaning and bandaging my wounds. They stung for days afterwards, though thankfully they were shallow. Zhahllaia asked about them that night and I told her the story while we lay in bed together.
I returned to the shore the next day. Now the stinging cuts in my chest reminded me of Tara. Wounds in the heart reflected on the flesh, and so on. Such foolish symbolism is easily mistaken for profundity by the young.
I walked along the shore, Oddrin scavenging in the pools for fish. Out near the rock formation, a piece of pink and white gleamed in the sun against the gray rocks of the shore. I made my way over to it, finding that it was a shell of exquisite shape. The outside was ivory, the inside a delicate pink. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. I had never seen any shell like it.
When I looked up, the nereid was watching me, her head poking from the waves. We stared at one another in silence. She blinked two pairs of eyelids, an inner one, clear and vertical, and the outer one, horizontal and colored like her skin. I lifted my hand in greeting.
She was still for a time, bobbing up and down in the swells. Finally, she lifted her hand from the water. I held up the shell and called to her. "Is this for me?"
After a moment of consideration, she opened her mouth and uttered a high-pitched shriek at the edge of my hearing.
"Thank you!" I shouted.
She vanished under the water. I assumed that was the end of it, taking the shell back to my room. Zhahllaia asked about it when I took her from her lamp that evening. I told her the story.
